She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (40 page)

Edward was far from being a simpleton, but his favoured pastimes had always tended toward the obvious diversions of hunting, music, and drinking into the night with the lowborn companions who so disconcerted his subjects. Isabella, on the other hand, was more sophisticated in her tastes. Among her possessions was an exquisite chess set, its pieces carved from crystal and jade, that had once belonged to Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Castile. And Edward was about to discover just how apt that legacy to his wife had been.

 

Isabella had done everything she could to be the perfect royal wife to a husband who had now demonstrated himself to be incorrigible. She had given him heirs; she had steered him towards the ways of peace and diplomacy; she had sought to reconcile him with his greatest subjects. And her reward was to find herself marginalised and intimidated within her own court.

Of course, as queen she enjoyed protections not available to others who fell victim to Despenser’s lust for wealth and power. (Alice Lacy, Lancaster’s widow, was threatened in her prison quarters that she would be burned to death unless she surrendered the bulk of her estates into the possession of the favourite and his father, while Despenser’s widowed sister-in-law Elizabeth Damory was another victim of a brazen campaign of bullying and blackmail that was as far-reaching as it was lucrative.) Nor did Isabella suffer any of the privations endured by the mass of Edward’s people after six long years of famine while Despenser heaped up piles of gold to be deposited with his Florentine bankers. Nevertheless, England’s queen was a shrewdly intelligent young woman, still only twenty-seven, with a vigorous sense of her own dignity and the need to secure the future of her royal children, and she was profoundly alarmed at the intensely vulnerable position in which her husband’s pliability had now placed her.

She was astute enough to know that there was little she could hope to achieve in the immediate aftermath of Despenser’s triumph in the spring of 1322. The king and his favourite were much preoccupied that summer with a renewed campaign against the Scots, who had seized the opportunity presented by the expiry of
the latest Anglo-Scottish truce to launch punishing raids into the north-west of England. Edward gathered an army and marched into Scotland, pushing northward into the highlands. However, the initially buoyant report of the campaign he sent back to the bishop of Winchester – ‘we have found no resistance’ – proved not to be a harbinger of success but a reflection once again of the Scots’ mastery of guerrilla warfare and scorched-earth tactics. By late August Edward’s troops were starving and sick, and he was forced to withdraw onto English soil with Bruce in menacing pursuit. The king reached York and safety by the skin of his teeth; but his queen was not quite so lucky.

Isabella had waited once again at Tynemouth Priory, just as she had when her husband and Gaveston had tried to make a stand against Lancaster at Newcastle in 1312. Then, she had made her escape south by road. Now, however, she was cut off on Tynemouth’s headland by the advancing Scots, while out to sea Flemish ships patrolled the coast in support of Bruce’s army. As the gravity of her situation began to hit home, Edward sent a scrawled order that some of Despenser’s men should march to Tynemouth to protect the queen. But Despenser, for Isabella, was an enemy to be feared just as much as the Scots, and she refused point-blank to place her life in the hands of his troops even as she sent panic-stricken appeals for aid. The king despatched instead a detachment of soldiers ‘more agreeable than the others’ – but by then they found themselves unable to fight their way through the Scots’ advance into Yorkshire. Isabella and her entourage were faced with the dreadful realisation that help was not coming. Some of her household squires did what they could to hold the Scots at bay by shoring up the Priory’s defences before bundling the queen and her attendants on board ship. They made a narrow escape, effected under extreme pressure, which cost the lives of two of her ladies, one lost in the chill waters of the North Sea, the other in premature labour. And by the time the queen reached land and safety at Scarborough, her fear and distrust of Despenser had become an implacable loathing.

Isabella spent Christmas 1322 in the king’s company at York, but as winter gave way to spring her alienation from her husband and his court became ever more obvious. While Despenser consolidated his hold on Edward’s government, enriching both the royal coffers and his own through a combination of acute administrative efficiency and a limitless capacity for extortion, the queen kept quiet, waiting and watching as the fabric of politics was mercilessly shredded. In the spring of 1323 a truce was concluded with the Scots, but not before England had borne the heavy cost of the loss of Andrew Harclay, the hero of Boroughbridge, whom Edward had created earl of Carlisle in the aftermath of the battle. The debacle of the English campaign in the summer of 1322 had finally convinced Harclay, along with many others in the north, that the defences of his country could only be secured through negotiation with Robert Bruce, rather than armed confrontation. But when Edward and Despenser found out about Harclay’s meetings with Bruce he was arrested as a traitor, convicted without a hearing and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. By the end of March the pieces of his dismembered corpse had been despatched around the kingdom, his decomposing head set up on London Bridge, his butchered body on the city walls of Carlisle, Newcastle, Bristol and Shrewsbury.

With the execution of Harclay Edward deprived himself of one able lieutenant; the death of the earl of Pembroke a year later robbed him of another. Despite the suspicion with which he was regarded by Despenser, Pembroke had continued to give his all in Edward’s service, and the circumstances of his death emphasised just how great a loss he was. Having led the search for a settlement with the Scots in the summer of 1323, the fifty-year-old earl collapsed and died in Picardy in June 1324 en route for Paris, where he had been sent as an ambassador to the French court. His aborted mission was an urgent one: for, with war in the north temporarily quietened, another conflict was on the verge of erupting.

France by now had a new king, since Philippe V had died in January 1322 at the age of just thirty, leaving only daughters to
succeed him – who, thanks to the precedent established by his own succession, were barred by their sex from wearing the crown. The throne passed instead to his and Isabella’s youngest brother, twenty-eight-year-old Charles, who was crowned and anointed as Charles IV. But the change of regime had done nothing to mitigate growing tensions in Gascony between the competing jurisdictions of the French king and the English duke of Aquitaine. Charles, as was his right, demanded that Edward appear before him in person to do homage for the duchy. But Edward, who had accepted previous invitations to attend the French court for this purpose with such alacrity, this time refused to leave his kingdom, partly because of its dangerously disordered state, and partly because Despenser was reluctant to let go either of the reins of government or of the king whose presence allowed him to hold them. And as hostilities intensified at Saint-Sardos, sixty miles south-east of Bordeaux, it became abundantly clear that Charles was in no mood to compromise. In August 1324 he despatched an army to seize Gascony from Edward’s possession. The English king’s lieutenant there, his twenty-two-year-old half-brother Edmund, earl of Kent, made a poor fist of the military response, and in September the desperate English were forced to buy themselves breathing space with a six-month truce that left huge territorial gains in the hands of the French.

With Anglo-French relations in deep crisis for the first time in a generation, the foreignness of England’s French-born queen was suddenly exposed as never before, and Despenser was quick to take advantage of her vulnerability. In two extraordinary weeks that September, she was systematically stripped of her comforts and resources as queen. First, her lands were confiscated, without warning or compensation. Second, her household was purged when an order was given for the internment of all French subjects in England. In all, Isabella lost the loyal service of twenty-seven of her closest attendants, including her chaplains and her doctor. And third, her three younger children – eight-year-old John, six-year-old Eleanor and three-year-old Joan, who did not yet, like their elder brother
Edward, have households of their own – were removed from her custody and given into the keeping of Despenser’s wife and sister.

It was a dangerous as well as distressing moment. Despenser, it seemed, intended to leave Isabella stranded on the political sidelines, bereft of influence and support and rendered powerless by her isolation, while he consolidated his hold over the king to the exclusion of all others. But Despenser, it turned out, was no cool strategist, surveying the playing field with a dispassionately judicious eye. Instead, as he clutched tighter and tighter at the power he had achieved, the panic and paranoia that drove his relentless aggression were ever more apparent.

Enemies, it seemed, were everywhere. England’s fortresses were full not just of interned Frenchmen but of incarcerated rebels – and keeping them safely under lock and key was proving harder than Edward and Despenser had anticipated. Lord Berkeley, a Gloucestershire baron who had fought at the earl of Lancaster’s side in 1322, almost escaped from Wallingford Castle in Oxfordshire in January 1323. Eight months later another prisoner, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, demonstrated with extraordinary daring that the regime had not succeeded in tightening its defences when he escaped from close confinement in the Tower. With the collusion of the fortress’s second-in-command, the garrison was stupefied with drugged wine while Mortimer scrambled up a chimney onto the roof, down a rope ladder flung over the massive curtain wall, and across the Thames in a rowing boat before riding headlong for the coast and France. From the French court, where he was welcomed by a French king whose patience with Edward was rapidly running out, Mortimer was suspected by Despenser of planning assassination attempts against his own life and that of the king. Meanwhile, evidence that dissidents within England were using necromancy in an attempt to bring down the government prompted Despenser to complain urgently to the pope that he was threatened by ‘magical and secret dealings’.

The pope gave these supernatural anxieties short shrift – ‘the Holy Father recommends him to turn to God with his whole heart
… no other remedies are necessary’, John XXII replied sternly – but clearly loyalty was an increasingly rare and fragile commodity in a kingdom where the functioning of royal power had become so horribly distorted by the toxic combination of Edward’s weakness and Despenser’s greed and suspicion. But the obsessive concern of both king and favourite to protect themselves against the threat of internal sedition did offer Isabella a glimmer of hope, a slender chance of finding an angle of attack on another flank from which their attention was crucially diverted. The war in Gascony was a disaster Edward and Despenser could not afford to ignore, and yet their ability to formulate a strategic response to English losses there was compromised by the tensions under which the regime was operating at home. Further fighting to defend the duchy was not an option in the absence of a competent general of proven loyalty, or while Despenser continued to stockpile cash rather than spending it on military operations. But at the same time Edward could not go to France to make peace and do homage for Gascony, since Despenser was unwelcome there and neither king nor favourite was prepared to contemplate the risks of their own separation.

But there was a solution to hand. Was not Isabella, queen of the English king, sister of the French, uniquely placed to resolve this unfortunate dispute? The pope thought so; Charles IV graciously indicated that he would be prepared to receive his sister as Edward’s emissary; and Isabella modestly put herself at her husband’s disposal. This proud queen had submitted to the indignities heaped upon her with patient dissimulation, so successfully that both the king and Despenser believed that she could be trusted to represent their interests and to return like a loyal lapdog, no matter how harshly she had previously been treated. Or, at least, they had convinced themselves that the danger that she would not do so was the least of the risks with which they found themselves confronted.

On 9 March 1325, therefore, Isabella crossed the Channel from Dover to the port of Wissant outside Boulogne, with an entourage of thirty-one attendants hand-picked for their allegiance to the Despenser regime. The queen gave thanks for her safe arrival
at the church where she had been married seventeen long years earlier, and then rode on via Pontoise, where she had once stayed in such grandeur with her husband, to Poissy, on the banks of the Seine fifteen miles north-west of Paris. There she was reunited with her brother, King Charles – a warm and emotional meeting, but one that did not presage any dramatic softening of the French stance over Gascony. Ever the publicly dutiful wife, Isabella sent news home to Edward of her painstaking negotiations, which were concluded by the end of the month. In exchange for Edward’s homage, to be performed on French soil by August, Charles would confirm the English king’s possession of all his French territories save the Gascon lands of the Agenais around Saint-Sardos that French troops had lately overrun, the possession of which would be submitted to formal adjudication in due course. Meanwhile – because of his affection for his sister, the
Vita
explained – the French king also agreed to renew the truce agreed the previous September.